Ghosts of a Dystopian Dream
by Arasinyah
Summary: She remembered a time when she didn't have a name, when she was just a cub, a not so furry, not so sharp-toothed cub but she was 'rescued',pulled into civilisation and broken. With no pack, no joy and no job, Masrani recruiting her for his facility saved her from a life of aimless wandering. She hadn't expected raptors. She hadn't Owen Grady. She hadn't expected to find a new pack.
1. Chapter 1

_~1~_

* * *

"You're not really pack you know." The woman who had come up with Hoskins said. Vic had driven up right while Owen was in the middle of exercises with his raptors, perfect timing as usual and she'd come up to the rails with him. He had noticed her, the only one who was calm and unaffected even as one of the handlers came close to falling over into the cage. She'd just watched without any expression on her face which was unusual to say the least.

There was at least some awe that should have shown. The raptors inspired it even if his feats with them didn't. Hoskins was too impressed by them in fact, something that always rubbed Owen the wrong way but the woman's sheer lack of reaction was disconcerting.

"Who are you?"

"Masrani asked me to look over your project." She said, still cold.

"She was feral, raised by wolves." Hoskins clapped a hand over her shoulder and for a brief moment Owen saw thunder make its way onto her face. "Simon thought she'd have some insight you could use."

Vic never did have a way with women. The way Owen's raptors looked at him alone should have told him to back off but he never did take the hint. The days of Vic's visits were when his girls were most organised. Owen was pretty sure they thought if they did well on the exercise he'd let Hoskins in as a treat for them to rip apart.

Whoever this woman was, she wasn't taking it. The hand Vic had left on her shoulder was pulled away at an angle that had Vic on the ground to stop it from breaking and she must have twisted some ligaments anyway. Hoskins on his knees in front of this frankly tiny woman, it was all kinds of amazing.

"Careful where you put your hands. Wouldn't want something to happen to it now would we?" she let his wrist go only after scratching her nails over his pulse briefly. If she had his girls' claws Vic would be bleeding to death already and they all knew that.

"File your reports." Vic told Owen before stalking off, rubbing his wrist.

This was turning out to be a day of oddities. Hell, maybe Owen would go home to find Claire there beaming and discussing their second date in board shorts.

"You gotta teach me how to do that." Owen said his eyes pinned on the quickly retreating car. Hoskins was running out his tail tucked firmly between his legs.

"Some things can't be taught."

Owen laughed. He had been judged and found lacking and he had enough humility to submit to her judgement for the time being. "Owen, Owen Grady." He stuck his hand out but she only took it after she gave him a once over. He felt naked but not in the good way.

"Maxine Laverne." She offered a thin knife's edge smile that didn't reach her eyes.

"So you were saying something before about my pack?"

"They don't think of you as pack. You're an alpha, sure but you're not necessarily their alpha. Frankly I don't know if it's possible for you to be the alpha."

"And why is that?" Owen didn't appreciate being told his position in his pack but she hadn't gone out of her way to offend him yet and Masrani for all his enthusiasm for dinosaurs wasn't a complete idiot. Unlike Vic he listened to Owen when he was told not to get too close to the raptor cage and she had done the same. For that alone he was willing to listen to her.

His girls had been misbehaving of late. Dr Wu said it was a by-product of his girls going through the dinosaur equivalent of puberty but that didn't make it any easier for him to handle. They were getting restless, only last week Blue and Charlie had gotten into a fight and when he'd gone to break it up it had taken a lot of coaxing for him to manage them.

"You're male. We don't know if raptors have female alphas and their mates or the other way round."

"The team at Isla Sorna-"

"Observed them during hatching season, I checked. Dr Wu said that as far as he knows Raptors have a fertility period once every four years only which means that the behaviour they observed was not necessarily what counts as the norm, there were too many variables and nesting behaviour is a good way of judging how the raptors fight due to their protective instincts taking over but it's not an insight into everyday behaviour. Even if it was the norm since all the dinosaurs are engineered to be female they might not accept a male alpha."

"So me being a dude is more of a problem than me being human?"

"You've been having troubles lately with them haven't you?" She said knowingly and a muscle in Owen's jaw twitched.

"Dr Wu says they're going through 'puberty'."

"And that makes them sensitive to pheromones, yours in particular. Besides that you're a bipedal which is a commonality. They know you're different in other ways, softer, more hairy and quite obviously clawless but these things they are used to. They grew up with you."

"I imprinted on them when they were hatched." He said, wondering where she was going with this.

"You're Dad. You put food on the table, you tell them what to do but there's a generation gap. You're not part of their clique even though you're in the family. You don't spend as much time with them as they do with each other. You're not pack. What I saw today with you rewarding good behaviour, that is training behaviour not alpha behaviour. You might run into problems later."

"Later?"

"In case someone decides to fight you for the Alpha position. You might not even realise in what way the challenge presents itself and then you'd lose them. You need to define your place in the pack clearly and solidify it. They _want_ you as Alpha you just have to prove yourself to them."

"And I suppose you have a solution to this?"

The thin sharp smile turned real, reaching her eyes giving them an unholy gleam a bit too reminiscent of Blue. Her teeth were bared slowly in a grin and he just caught the sight of the tip of her tongue running over them in one swift motion before she spoke.

"You need to hunt with them."


	2. Chapter 2

Owen paused on the pebbled walkway leading to the shack and took a deep breath. Apologising to women was an art he hadn't quite mastered which was strange considering how often he had to do it. Pissing women off was something he _had_ mastered and done so very early on since his little sister had been born.

He continued on his way and stopped again wondering how to get her attention. Max's back was to him while she tended to an outdoor fire. The orange and yellow flames flickered and silhouetted her figure giving the dark hair that blowing in the wind an unearthly glow. He was reminded of illustration a book he'd once read about witches. Or was it one about banshees? He hadn't been very interested in the book really.

He wondered if he should do something; make some noise, step on a branch to make her aware of his presence. She reminded him of his girls too often and surprising a raptor wasn't a good idea and he didn't think surprising her was one too.

"Are you just going to stand there?" Her voice dry as usual sounded and he almost jumped. She turned and he saw on her lips the same sharp, amused smile he'd seen before and with the light and shadows falling on her face sharpening angles he didn't know were there, creating hollows under her cheekbones that made her look absolutely unearthly.

"You knew I was there?"

"Owen you may think you're quiet but you're really not." Owen did not relax. He was in fact very quiet, stealth was one of the many things he'd learnt as a marine. Barry and his girls were the few who were never surprised by him creeping up on them but they were a rare group. "And your motorcycle can be heard a mile away."

He had a feeling she was just giving him that out but he would take it. She didn't hear him but the motorcycle.

"I, uh, just wanted to apologise for…for-"

"Laughing in my face till tear works started?" She wasn't offended at all, just amused. It made him wonder if he really needed to apologise at all.

But he _had_ laughed in her face and he had continued to do so until tears started and after she had walked off he had continued laughing until he had to sit down on the ground.

Because the minute she'd said he needed to hunt with the pack he had a vision of telling Claire exactly that, telling Masrani exactly that and the faces they would make were just so incredible to imagine. Then he imagined them agreeing to that and actually hunting with his girls and that's when the hysterical laughter had started. None of it was funny but he couldn't really think of another way of dealing with it except laughter.

"Yes, that."

"Don't worry about it, it's fine. It was very typically human of you which only served to make the difference between you and the raptors even more obvious."

"It makes sense but getting permission to go on a hunt would be difficult. If we were a bit farther with our training then we'd have Vic on our side but until then there's no chance of it happening."

Her face changed quickly as she made beseeching doe eyes and looked up at him through fluttering lashes. "Do you want me to talk to Claire for you?" She said, so soft and sweet it had him dazed.

"Umm what?"

"Do you want me to talk to Claire for you?" She repeated.

"No, I mean what are you doing with your face and –" His hand moved wildly to indicate her mouth and her face fell into the same slumberous predatory blankness he had come to associate with her.

"Practising being human. Did it not come out right?"

"Lady, _how_ do you go through life?"

"Usually by avoiding places with the population of a large city but obviously that won't work here."

"You don't like people?"

"The first time I met 'people' was when they separated me from my pack injuring them in the process because my pack quite obviously defended me from the humans that were forcibly separating me from them. So no, I don't like people, they did not make a very good first impression." For a moment he saw anger, pure unadulterated rage before it dropped off and he shifted uncomfortably. She noticed and gestured at the log asking him without words to sit and he didn't quite know how to tell her that sitting wouldn't help his condition.

She was just really hot when she got angry and it was affecting him in ways his body couldn't hide.

"So you were really raised by wolves?" He asked, desperate for a change of topic but also curious. The psychology of a pack mentality made sense to him but while he was able to implement it in ways, he couldn't entirely submit to it. It would just never make complete sense to him and here he had someone who might be able to explain it to him in ways that books and mere observation couldn't.

"I wasn't raised by wolves I _was_ a wolf. There were physical dissimilarities of course but I never truly knew them. I wasn't treated differently by them and…when you're pack you're pack. You hunt together, you sleep together, you run together, you breathe together. You are reprimanded for something you've only just thought of doing because it is obvious, everything you think, you feel, it is worn on your skin and on your body. There is nothing you can hide and there should be no reason to because that is how deep the trust goes." She bit her lip, eyes alight with something she couldn't put to words. Or maybe she didn't want to, it was pretty obvious that this was personal in so many ways.

"So-"

She bulldozed on, ignoring him. " _You_ don't trust your pack, you are afraid of them, you keep secrets I honestly don't know why they give you the latitude they do. They are kept in a cage and they get to see you walk away and be free. It is _ridiculous_."

Owen swallowed hard. When put like that…but she was still talking.

"You're afraid that they'll kill you and eat you or that they'll damage you when playing with you, fine, but at least don't call yourself the alpha of the pack because you just demean alphas all over the world when you say that."

"Wait, playing with me?"

"They bite each other too and that's really just play, same with the pushing each other around, it's just like when siblings fight."

"Only with claws and sharp teeth." He said flatly. He had a deep scar running across his torso form when Blue had grown too large to be played with anymore.

"Well it's not their fault you can't handle it. You're the alpha you should be able to handle it and you should be doling it out that's how you reprimand them, that's how you keep them in line."

"But I can't do that." He said slowly. He had no claws or teeth, guns were absolutely out of question and they had been tased by one too many idiots who thought they needed to be prodded like cattle when they had been shifted to the bigger facility. Owen was still furious about that, he hadn't been informed at all and his girls had been terrified without him there.

"Which is why I told you to hunt with them." She imitated his drawl. "We can set up a perimeter limit and get the raptors some trackers. Get some herbivore herds that can be corralled and really properly hunted because a good run will help them with their cabin fever and when you take the first part of the meal they'll know you're alpha."

"I'll need to do some more research before I can pitch this to Claire."

"But you'll try?"

Owen suddenly realised he wanted to do this, he wanted to show in his actions that he would be there for his girls. He couldn't talk their language, he had failed them once before and he didn't want to do it again, whatever he had to do he would have to do but first he needed to convince Masrani and Claire.

"I'll try."


End file.
